#rp23 keynote speaker AX Mina: On technology futures and magic.

AX Mina (aka An Xiao) is a a creative consultant, futures thinker and leadership coach.

She served as a contributing editor for the book Ai Weiwei: Spatial Matters. AX published Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power in January 2019 and is co-author of The Hanmoji Handbook with Jason Li and Jennifer 8. Lee. She has also written for the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, Nieman Journalism Lab and New York Magazine, among others.

She is currently a Senior Civic Media Fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Journalism and Communications and an affiliate at the Institute for the Future, and she is a certified trauma-informed yoga teacher.

At #rp23, we look forward to AX’s exciting insights on the topic of technology futures and magic. You can get a first insight into the topic in the following interview that we conducted with the researcher in advance.

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Let's talk about #CASH. An interview with AX
Mina.

What are you currently working on?

I’m currently working as a creative consultant, futures thinker and leadership coach. I’m also a yoga teacher, mindfulness practitioner and artist who brings in intuitive tools for a shared creative and meditative practice. And I’ve become deeply interested in more plural, inclusive and sustainable visions of the future and how we can reimagine futures that speak to the crises of today with far more than technological solutions but approaches that merge ancient wisdom traditions with contemporary notions of justice and equity.

Can you tell us a bit more about that? How does magic come into play here?

Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic, argued Arthur C. Clarke. Certainly what we’re seeing today with generative AI is nothing short of magical. And yet this limits magic to the confines of technological achievement and ability. As Oxford professor Chris Gosden has argued, developing an ethos of 21st century magic can be a powerful antidote to our societal ailments, reminding us of our interconnectedness with living beings and the earth. “Magical thinking” is often used as a pejorative, but over time perhaps we’ll understand an extractive stance toward the earth as the anomalous, absurd view of the world. Seeing the world as magical is a way for us to connect with just how precious this existence is. 

And what topics would you like to discuss with others at #rp23? 

At #rp23, I’m hoping to talk more about where the world is going in this post-lockdown phase of life. While the pandemic isn’t over per se, society as a whole is moving on from the trauma of the past few years without fully reckoning with the events that brought us here. Meanwhile, global conflict, climate change and economic uncertainties are adding to a sense of permacrisis. What are the new values we’re bringing to the world? How do we maintain our mental and societal health? What does it mean to ensure a sustainable existence on this planet? How do we ensure safety in an unsafe world? Why do we still need to pay our bills when the world is literally and figuratively burning?

Writing about South Asian futurisms, Sadaf Padder has observed that thinking about the future is something for all of us, “I am a child of immigrants who were the children of immigrants that imagined and strived for brighter futures. I know that they read the stars and heeded their dreams and prayed.” I love that vision.

What answers have you found to these pressing questions of the present?

To look forward into the future, I’m interested in what ancient wisdom traditions have to offer about the crises we face. Technocratic views of the world have shaped the extraction of earth’s resources and led to a doctrine of endless growth. The tremendous popularity of meditation, yoga, astrology and intuitive arts — practices that fairly recently were derided as “magical” or at least not worth considering in the mainstream — suggest that a technocratic worldview might be giving way to notions of responsibility and care, for both people and the planet.

In light of this year's theme, CASH, what issue, particularly close to your heart, is affected by the availability or lack of financial resources? 

We treasure what we measure, but we also measure what we treasure. What I mean by that is that so many of the metrics we use to define success are defined by the financial value, or treasure, they provide. GDP, for example, is considered a primary marker of a nation’s success, just as the stock price is for an organisation’s success, just as one’s follower count is a marker for one’s social media influence. But these quantifiable metrics can overshadow other values, like the efforts we take to build inclusive communities, ensure healthy and sustainable livelihoods, and promote a responsible relationship with the earth.

How does this logic of quantifiable metrics affect our relationship with technologies?

The first half of last decade brought about the ascendance of techno-optimism, the idea that technology will inherently lead to a better society. The second half of last decade gave us a dominance of techo-pessimism. As we emerge from the pandemic, I’m finding a sense of techno-intentionality — that technology is neither inherently good or bad for society but rather that we can be intentional about the values we prioritise for. As technology developers often ask, “What are you optimising for?” If the metric you’re excited about looks best when going up and to the right, it likely correlates with ideas of endless growth. What if we optimise for care and safety in our digital communities and workplaces? What if we optimise for joy and wonder? And what would our technologies look like in these situations?

And last but not least: What are your current recommendations for reading, podcasts, or videos?

I’d be remiss if I didn’t recommend Five and Nine, a podcast about the future of magic through the lens of work and economic justice, which I produce with Dorothy R. Santos and Xiaowei R. Wang. Our current season, Season 3, is about rest. We talked recently about cash and art with financial analyst Victoria Ku but also the importance of rest and slowing down after leaving a nine-to-five with futurist and artist Nour Batyne. We have some episodes coming up about working outside of capitalist systems, and the experience of being laid off.

For the futures geeks, some of the latest I’ve been thinking about is Ytasha Womack’s talk on Afrofuturism at the Institute for the Future (where I contribute as a research affiliate) and Sadaf Padder’s recent writing in Hyperallergic on South Asian futures. I also recommend Adrienne Maree Brown and Ayana Young’s reflections on the power of storytelling to help us imagine a just climate future and this conversation with Alisha Baghat, Nour Batyne and Dr. Nandini Pandey on thinking about both past and future as a place of living inquiry. And of course there’s the terrific Black Futures edited by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham.

On the theme of CASH, I find podcasts offer the richest (pun intended) way to explore cash, money and resources with a lot of heart. The podcasts I listen to about money are So Money by Farnoosh Torabi, NPR’s Planet Money, and Refinery29’s Money Diaries. They’re a mix of practical resources and inspiring stories, and not the usual shaming (about debt management) or gaming (about stock and crypto picks). And Jack Weatherford’s The History of Money helped me a lot with understanding the cultural historical context of money — including, for instance, that the word “money” comes from the temple for Juno Moneta, where the first Roman mint was established.